Work and thoughts in progress

And now… a skyscape

Yesterday, after too long of not painting anything, I started on a new painting. The painting is an unusual one: a skyscape, or to put it more simply; a painting of clouds.

I have this idea to do a series of maybe three pictures on the subject of clouds. In any case this first one is a midday-afternoon picture of white clouds on a blue sky. So far it looks kind of blue, as you can see in the photo.

The next ones (if I keep on with this) will be a dawn picture and a storm picture. I also have some other ideas up my sleeve, but we will see how far I’ll take this.

So where did I get this crazy idea from? Well, it’s been hanging around for a while as I’ve been convincing myself that clouds are a worthy thing to paint. In the end I convinced myself that who cares if it is worthy; I’ve cleared space in my storage with the pictures at Nofim Gallery and some more I hung around the house, so there is some space to put some more in there.

This is the reaction to what I wrote yesterday about the pressure to produce saleable work in quota. This is just having fun.

A couple of technical points. In my “Rain on Rashi Street” picture I had a problem that most of the canvas was covered with underpainting only. This was a black glaze diluted with water. When I varnished the finished piece, the underpaint didn’t adhere to the canvas as well as it should have and some of it came off leaving patches. In order that this won’t happen again I used here matt acrylic medium to dilute the paint that I laid down for the sky. I did add a small amount of water so that it would flow better – but no more than that. This makes a much thicker and more adherent layer equal to regular painting although it was layed down as a glaze.

The colors used were phthalo blue, “Talens Amsterdam” titanium white (which as you may remember I once complained about its transparency, but here this was exactly what I wanted) and a small amount of ultramarine blue at the base of the painting. The sky is a gradation of glazes going from a very pale ultramarine to almost pure phthalo at the top. The result is a bit more saturated than I had wanted, so I am going to do another layer of diluted white maybe with a small quantity of ultramarine and then I acn get on to the clouds.